Anonymised data from the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app provided rich insights into the drivers of the epidemic, at remarkable speed.
July 11, 2024
Anonymised data from the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app provided rich insights into the drivers of the epidemic, at remarkable speed.
February 22, 2023
I wrote a blog for Nature’s ‘Behind the paper’ collection here all about our paper ‘Epidemiological impacts of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales throughout its first year’, published February 2023 in Nature Communications.
August 02, 2021
The NHS COVID-19 App Data Team and independent scientific advisors are continually working to evaluate the impact of the app and to use anonymised data from the app to gain insights into the spread of the virus. Professor Christophe Fraser and I wrote a blog about this which you can read on the Fraser group website here.
May 12, 2021
The NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales is one part of the toolkit for curbing the spread of COVID-19. But how effective is it in practice? Our Nature paper examines its impact in Autumn / Winter 2020.
March 18, 2021
A “national reproduction number” R becomes trickier to estimate and to interpret as case numbers decrease. This post began life as a twitter thread. I thought it might be useful to keep a copy here for easy reference.
November 30, 2020
Last month I was interviewed by Dr Houry Melkonian for a special release of the European Women in Mathematics newsletter, focusing on covid-19 and its impact on maths and mathematicians. In this interview I reflect on my career to date and my experiences of working on covid-19 this year.
October 15, 2020
The NHS Test and Trace programme was rolled out in May 2020, first on the Isle of Wight (5th) and then across England (18-28th). We looked to see whether there were any changes in the course of the epidemic which could be attributable to the Test and Trace programme, and whether there was any difference in the programme’s effect on the Isle of Wight, where it also included version 1 of the NHS contact tracing app. Here we provide a brief summary of our findings; the full details are now published in The Lancet Digital Health.
May 29, 2020
COVID-19 antibody tests are rapidly becoming widely available. These are the tests which can tell you whether or not you have previously been infected by the COVID-19 virus SARS-COV-2. The tests look for antibodies in the blood which are made by the body in response to infection, and which reach high enough levels to be detectable from about 3 weeks after infection (or 2 weeks after symptoms began, if you had them). Today in the UK many suppliers have sold out - people are understandably keen to know whether or not they have had the virus. However, there have been confusing reports in the media about how we can interpret these tests and some have been temporarily withdrawn from sale over questions about their accuracy. To what extent are these tests useful, and how can we interpret them?
April 19, 2020
The latest work of the Oxford BDI Pathogen Dynamics team shows that digital contact tracing can have a profound, life-saving impact on the progression of COVID-19. I wrote a blog post about this which you can find on the group website here.
June 11, 2018
When studying an outbreak of an infectious disease, researchers often want to know who infected whom.